Why a Stay-at Home Mom Needs a Maid

A mom rises early before the children to get ready for the day. She wakes up her sleeping babies for breakfast, wrestles them into their clothes, finds all of their backpacks and strewn papers, and scurries to the bus. If she has younger children, she immediately begins her day with them. If she is home for the day, well it is hardly rest time. She first needs to look at the day’s schedule. Are there doctor’s appointments, soccer practices, or tutoring? While she is making a plan of action for today, she is already jumping ahead to tomorrow taking mental stock of the refrigerator and of the laundry. Perhaps a run to the grocery store is in order to make sure that lunches are fully stocked for the morning or maybe the go to breakfast stock is running low, and, to avoid morning break downs at all costs, strawberry oatmeal must be on hand and on the ready.

All of this mental preparation is being done while mom, playing maid, cleans up after breakfast, strips beds that may had, ahem, wet nights, and checks any diva’s room for piles of outfits that just wouldn’t do. When she gets the home ready to function smoothly for the rest of the day, she also begins mentally making a grocery list. She must go to the store though not before figuring the budget, making a concrete, detailed dinner menu and grocery list. Spaghetti night sounds easy, but child one has Celiac, child two has sensory dysfunction, and child three just will not eat spaghetti. It is dad’s favorite, so she plans a nice Italian meal complete with chicken nuggets, gluten free waffles, and chocolate milk.

On the way to the grocery store, she returns movies, stops at the church, runs a prescriptions though the drive thru, takes dry socks to kid number two who splashed in a puddle on the playground, and runs in the warehouse store because it is the only market that sells the right shape of chicken nuggets for kid number two. While at the church, she learns that the budget for the women’s club did not balance, and she must make several phone calls to find the missing receipt before the financial clerk for the parish goes mad. Upon returning from the store, she barely beats the bus to the corner. The kids blast through the house allowed free range while mom carried in the bags of groceries.
Homework, soccer practice, spelling tests, break downs, long division, smoke alarm—now dad is home. He takes over the stove while the stay-at-home executive does recon on the house and thinks for the twentieth time today, “If I could just have a maid once a week…”

A mom never gets to sit and relax knowing all of her work is done, and she rarely gets to use a clean fresh-smelling bathroom. She may never get a day off, but if she had a maid, she could enjoy a fully cleaned house—until the kids get home.